PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Former President Jimmy Carter publicly appeared Sunday at the Georgia church where he worships for the first time since undergoing brain surgery in November.

The 95-year-old Carter and his wife of more than 70 years, Rosalynn, attended services at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains on Sunday, news outlets reported. Parishioners also prayed for the Carters, who were nestled into front-row seats at the church where Carter famously has taught Sunday school.
The nation's oldest-ever ex-president underwent surgery last month at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta to relieve pressure on his brain caused by bleeding from a fall.

Carter has faced several health issues in recent years. Earlier this month, he was treated at a hospital for a urinary tract infection. In October, he was hospitalized for a fall that fractured his pelvis and another fall in which he hit his head and required 14 stitches. A previous fall required he get hip surgery. In 2015, he was diagnosed with melanoma. After having parts of his liver removed and undergoing radiation, immunotherapy and treatment for brain lesions, he announced that he was cancer-free. (that's all, link for verification)

A top State Department aide told acting US ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor -- a key witness in President Donald Trump's impeachment inquiry -- to hand over his duties just days before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to visit Kiev in January, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.

The timing means that Pompeo will not have to meet, be seen or photographed with Taylor, who drew the President's ire after his damning House testimony that Trump demanded his appointees set up a quid pro quo with Ukraine, explicitly offering much-needed US military aid and an Oval Office meeting in exchange for personal political favors.
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The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that Ulrich Brechbuhl, a key aide to Pompeo, told Taylor that Pompeo wanted him to hand over responsibilities in early January, before the top US diplomat arrived, and that Taylor understood Pompeo didn't want to be photographed with him during his visit.
Taylor will step down from his post and leave Ukraine on January 2, two sources familiar with his plans tell CNN. The exact dates of Pompeo's visit have not been made public.

Although Taylor's appointment expires in early January, the State Department could have tried to extend his stay in Kiev, but sources tell CNN there was no effort to do so despite the vacuum his departure will create in US leadership on relations with Ukraine at a particularly fraught time.
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Tourists, firefighters flee as new heatwave fans Australia blazes Tourists and firefighters were forced to flee vast fires burning in southeastern Australia on Monday, as a heatwave rekindled devastating bush blazes across the country.

Authorities said "quite a number" of the 30,000 tourists visiting the usually picturesque southeast tip of the continent had heeded calls to evacuate.

More than a dozen blazes are raging in the East Gippsland countryside, some so intensely that hundreds of firefighters were pulled back beyond a firefront estimated to stretch 1,000 kilometres (600 miles).
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It is the latest emergency in Australia's devastating summer fire season, which has been turbocharged by a prolonged drought and climate change.
Ten people have been killed, more than 1,000 homes destroyed and more than three million hectares (7.4 million acres) -- an area bigger than Belgium -- have been scorched.
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Greta Thunberg’s father has opened up about how activism helped his daughter out of depression but still worries about how she will deal with the impact of her international fame.

Speaking to the BBC to mark his daughter’s guest-editing slot on the Today programme, Svante Thunberg revealed he thought it was a “bad idea” for Greta to stage the school strike that catapulted her into the public eye.

The programme also featured a discussion between Greta Thunberg and the veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough, in which the latter praises the teenager for raising awareness of the climate crisis.
She had “achieved things that many of us who have been working on it for 20-odd years have failed to achieve – that is you have aroused the world”, said Sir David, adding that she was the main reason climate was discussed during the British election campaign.
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ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia doesn't have to put almost 100,000 voters back on its rolls, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones ruled that a voting rights advocacy group founded by Democrat Stacey Abrams is improperly asking him to interpret state law. Jones also said the group hasn't proved that people who have been removed had their constitutional rights violated.

However, Jones also ordered Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to do more to warn people that they had been removed. The judge is especially singling out a southwest Georgia state House district where a Jan. 28 special election is scheduled. Voters there who have been removed have only until Monday to re-register.

President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper. more at link

SPRINGFIELD, Va. (AP) — Inside a hotel ballroom near the nation’s capital, a U.S. Army officer with battlefield experience told 120 state and local election officials that they may have more in common with the military strategists than they might think.
These government officials are on the front lines of a different kind of high-stakes battlefield — one in which they are helping to defend American democracy by ensuring free and fair elections.
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That officer and other past and present national security leaders had a critical message to convey to officials from 24 states gathered for a recent training held by a Harvard-affiliated democracy project: They are the linchpins in efforts to defend U.S. elections from an attack by Russia, China or other foreign threats, and developing a military mindset will help them protect the integrity of the vote.
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“It’s another level of war,” said Jesse Salinas, the chief elections official in Yolo County, California, who attended the training. “You only attack things that you feel are a threat to you, and our democracy is a threat to a lot of these nation-states that are getting involved trying to undermine it. We have to fight back, and we have to prepare.”
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On November 6, 2016, the Sunday before the presidential election that sent Donald Trump to the White House, a worker in the elections office in Durham County, North Carolina, encountered a problem.
There appeared to be an issue with a crucial bit of software that handled the county’s list of eligible voters. To prepare for Election Day, staff members needed to load the voter data from a county computer onto 227 USB flash drives, which would then be inserted into laptops that precinct workers would use to check in voters. The laptops would serve as electronic poll books, cross-checking each voter as he or she arrived at the polls.

The problem was, it was taking eight to 10 times longer than normal for the software to copy the data to the flash drives, an unusually long time that was jeopardizing efforts to get ready for the election. When the problem persisted into Monday, just one day before the election, the county worker contacted VR Systems, the Florida company that made the software used on the county’s computer and on the poll book laptops. Apparently unable to resolve the issue by phone or email, one of the company’s employees accessed the county’s computer remotely to troubleshoot. It’s not clear whether the glitch got resolved—Durham County would not answer questions from POLITICO about the issue—but the laptops were ready to use when voting started Tuesday morning.
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That fall day has come to represent a typical schedule for Letter, the genial, self-deprecating lead lawyer for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). After a 40-year career at the Justice Department, defending policies of presidential administrations from both parties, Letter now speaks for the speaker in courtrooms throughout the country while advising House leaders on impeachment.

Letter is slated to represent the House at the Supreme Court, which will review two rare separation-of-powers cases over disclosure of Trump’s tax and financial records in March.

And in back-to-back hearings Jan. 3 at the federal appeals court in Washington, Letter will explain why the judges should give the House access to secret evidence from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. His colleague, Megan Barbero, will then ask the court to uphold a ruling forcing McGahn to appear before a House committee despite White House efforts to block his testimony.

“Because of the stonewalling by the Trump administration and the insistence on going to court on every kind of thing, it’s very demanding with multiple opponents and multiple cases,” said Irv Nathan, who held Letter’s position the first time Pelosi was speaker, starting in 2007. “The job is on steroids.”
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House Counsel Douglas Letter said in a filing in federal court that a second impeachment could be necessary if the House uncovers new evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct investigations of his conduct. Letter made the argument as part of an inquiry by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals about whether Democrats still need testimony from former White House Counsel Don McGahn following the votes last week to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

"If McGahn’s testimony produces new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles approved by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly—including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment," Letter wrote.
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